The present invention relates generally to data network communication, and more particularly to data network communication using identifiers mappable to resource locators.
Content delivery via data networks is becoming increasingly popular. One such data network, the Internet, has become a popular means for users to access information on various topics of interest. There are numerous content providers disseminating information via the Internet on various subjects. For example, there are content providers providing information on sports, news, finance, science, entertainment, etc. The content providers make this information available to users via websites, and end users access the information using web browsers. So-called “web surfing” of websites using an Internet browser is well known in the art.
In addition to the basic content, many websites also contain extraneous content, often in the form of advertising. From the content provider's perspective, advertising is desirable because it generates revenue for the content provider. Advertisers are willing to pay significant advertising fees to the more popular websites. However, from the end user's perspective, advertising is unnecessary (and often unwanted) information being displayed on the user's computer. In addition to merely being unnecessary or unwanted, advertising content may have deleterious effects on the user's web browsing experience. For example, advertising content often consists of graphics and animation, which uses bandwidth and may slow down the delivery of the desired content. Also, the complexity of some advertising content requires additional processing by the users web browser, which delays the display of the webpage at the user's computer.
A webpage may contain various types of advertising. One type is an inline advertisement in which the content provider inserts advertising content into the webpage. Another type of advertising is interstitial advertising, in which an advertisement page is shown before the actual requested content page. A user generally must view the interstitial page for a period of time before the requested content is delivered or displayed. Another type of advertising is called outsourced advertising, in which a webpage has a reference to a third party web server and the user's web browser requests and retrieves the advertisement from the third party web server. Regardless of the type of advertising, users generally may prefer to view content without such extraneous content.
There have been various attempts by users to block advertising from websites. One such attempt is the use of a browser plug-in to filter out advertising. A browser plug-in is additional software that may be installed on a computer that adds functionality to the basic browser. For example, the Firefox web browser has an available plug-in called Adblock. The Adblock plug-in allows a user to specify a set of pattern rules, each of which can either be a literal match along with the wildcard “*”, or can be a full regular expression. The uniform resource locators (URLs) of all objects to be retrieved by the browser are compared against these rules and if a match occurs then the object is either not retrieved or not rendered by the browser. While a user of the Adblock plug-in may define his/her own rules for filtering, there has also been developed a set of rules (called Filterset.G) that may be shared among users. This large rule set has been developed by incorporating input from multiple users. The rule set is one large generic set of rules, which may be downloaded and used by users of the Adblock browser plug-in. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/409,123 entitled Data Network Content Filtering Using Categorized Parameters describes a technique for using categorized filtering parameters for filtering data network content rather than a large generic rule filter set.
As described above, many content providers derive a substantial amount of revenue from website advertising. As such, the increased use and effectiveness of techniques to block advertising content may result in reduced advertising revenues for the content providers. As such, there is a need for a technique for use by content providers to ensure that advertisements get delivered to users without being filtered out.